Five Thousand Miles
My blog today – about flying last March, during the active part of the Iran war, from Israel to Canada – is in the form of a poem, which I set to music, and is a rock video on YouTube.
The lyrics are a poem I wrote just before Passover, immediately upon returning to Toronto from Israel through Egypt – an ironic reverse journey of the Exodus story.
Avoiding incoming Iranian missiles, our travel from our winter home in Tel Mond to Toronto took more than 48 hours. We took a taxi to Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station, then an Egged bus driving down to Eilat, where sirens sounded as we drove past Dimona. The moment an Eilat taxi dropped us off at our hotel that evening, sirens sounded again, so we left our bags in the lobby and joined all the other guests in the hotel’s basement bomb shelter. The next morning, another taxi to the Taba border, a lengthy passage through the Egyptian crossing, then a 40-minute taxi ride up from the Sinai coast to the high desert and the airstrip of Taba International Airport. By the afternoon, we had boarded our Bluebird Airways jet, which flew us over the barren Sinai Peninsula and across the Mediterranean to Athens. After an overnight stay, we flew to Montreal, and after a layover, boarded a plane for the final leg of our journey to Toronto, where a taxi took us to our home, arriving 48 hours after we left Tel Mond.
That night, jet-lagged, lying awake in the middle of the night, hearing the train rumbling through the valley below our house, I reflected on the journey to Here, now; from: now, There. The song also harkens back to some of my earliest childhood musical memories, hearing Peter Paul & Mary singing “500 Miles”, and later my brother and sister singing that song about leaving, traveling and longing.
I was also inspired by my literary hero Yehuda HaLevi, the great 12th century Hebrew poet and Arabic philosopher of Judaism. HaLevi wrote poems about his great sea voyage in 1140, at the age of 66, his end of life pilgrimage from his Diaspora home in Andalusia, across the Mediterranean to Egypt and ultimately (just after Passover in 1141) to the Land of Israel. HaLevi’s trip took weeks, not two days, and it was in a frail sailing vessel, not in modern aircraft. But my song is also about journeying, reminding me of “home” in its different senses, and how, “among whirlwinds, I’m a lower-case I in the heart of the storm”.
